Roger:
Staying in Gaza and trying to police it or leavimg Gaza and putting up the wall will not solve the problem. Anyone can attack either solution and rip it to shreds. Unfortunetly Israel is in the position of choosing which option is less hellish.
The only good aspect of leaving Gaza is that it takes away a couple of the most powerfull talking points of the Israeli haters. They will continue to blame Israel but there arguments will not resonate as well as the current ones. Occupation is such a easy sell. The current argument that Israeli is not pulling out of Gaza in the proper fashion takes more effort. “You been demanding the end of the “occupation” for decades, they are leaving, and you don’t like it!” I am not saying this is logical. But as agit-prop “improper end of occupation” is harder to sell then simple “occupation.” The severe Israeli haters will not stop their screeds. But for the apolitical or the indifferent they might not jump on to the Palestinian bandwagon on such thin gruel.
By leaving Gaza it also gives the Israelis some more rhetorical weapons. When the critics say that the wall is the cause of Palestinian misery they can point to the Arab judicial wall against the Palestinians. I think, and if I am wrong someone please correct me, that most Arab nations in the area do not allow palestinian migration into their countries, except for Jordon, and they do not allow normal economic relations with the Palestinian people. And Israel has the added bonus of stating the fact that the restrictions on movement are because of suicide bombs. What excuse do the arabs have? (actually they have the same fear but after portraying the Palestinians as noble victims it is hard to state the obvious that they do not let them in to their countries because they do not want the violence to happen in their countries).
When Hamas, Hizbollah, and the various permutations of the PLO give up the goal of destroying Israel there could be normal relations between the two states. The people of the world who view Zionism as the equal of nazism are hopeless. The PLO is corrupt so I have no doubt that Hamas will be running the show in Gaza and that is a nightmare. But when Israel is gone it may, over a period of decades, dawn on the Palestinian people that the war on Israel has brought them nothing but misery. I don’t think Israel could hold on to Gaza anymore then they could hold onto southern Lebanon.If they lived in a vacumn they have the military ability to do it but the International world can not be completly ignored. As I stated before all solutions are ugly and do not solve the problem. It has come down to which solution is less ugly. Pray for Israel and if Roger could provide a list of Israeli products that the blogosphere could buy from it could counter the Academic slander campaign that the left is waging.
Kevin Peters
